Category Archives: Social Media in Public Services

This week I am attending HouseParty the first ever unofficial housing fringe bringing together grassroots housing and social change-makers to explore, showcase and discuss the latest innovations in UK housing and beyond organised by @HACThousing and @SocialChangeAg. Have a look at the innovative programme and follow #hseparty14 to understand what has inspired @HseParty. My one regret is that the health and social care sectors have not seized this opportunity to engage with housing colleagues in addressing the challenges of community engagement and digital inclusion.

On Wednesday 25th June at 9.30 @PaulBromford, @HelReynolds and I will be contributing to @HseParty by having a very social conversation and we would love you to join us using the hashtag #socialconvo. Helen, Paul and I come from very different backgrounds but we share a belief that being social is about sharing generously, creating relationships and seeking new collaborations.

Our first#socialconvo was held in London where @MarkOneinFour, Paul and I discussed how social media can be used for social good. As Mark so delightfully puts it “how do you move social media from a broadcasting medium to a space where relationships grow and where, sometimes, magic things happen?”

I have long been a fan of Erik Qualmann and his powerful and very popular videos which provides statistics about the global influence of social media. As Erik says “it is not a question now about whether you should be involved in social media but how well you do it”

It was great to see Erik respond on Twitter to Paul’s comment that “the @equalman clip turns as many CEOs off as it excites”

Helen, Paul and I hope you will join us on Wednesday 25th June at 9.30 to explore “How social is your organisation and what investment do you need to make to become an influencer in the increasingly crowded social space?” We welcome your thoughts, comments and questions via #socialconvo!

PS: Congratulations are definitely in order for @HelReynolds who was number one on the #powerplayers14 list and who recently won the local government category of the Digital Leaders 100 Awards.

If you would like to explore the benefits of having a social conversation in your organisation do get in touch!

Social media has played an enormous role in giving a voice to people and organisations who previously had no platform. Social influence and digital leadership is now coming from a much more diverse group. The new influencers use Twitter, blogs, YouTube and other social media platforms to reach thousands of people.

People are beginning to wake up to the potential for social media to deliver social good. Organisations and communities who previously dismissed social media as a fad are beginning to ask ‘what can social media do for us?’.

But where is social media now? Where might social media be in five years time? What might it offer to anyone wanting to meet the growing need for new answers in delivering social good and transforming services?

This is an exciting time to explore the impact of social media in a digitally connected world and think about how social media could transform your work and organisations in the near future.

As part of the conversation Paul Taylor is chairing a ‘Question Time’-style debate exploring ways to develop skills as an influencer in the social space. You are invited to submit questions for the debate either through the comments here or using the hashtag #socialconvo on Twitter. Whilst we cannot guarantee to answer all of the questions submitted it will certainly be a lively debate!

A limited number of tickets are still available to attend this unique event and you can book here.

What if social media wasn’t a place for building brands? What if social media was not just another publicity channel? What if social media was not just a way to push your message?

What if social media was a place where social good could happen, rather than a place where people put out campaign messages saying social good should happen?

Social media, the name we give to a whole variety of different platforms, activities and mechanisms, is already all of those things. As I’ll be exploring further at “What can social media do to make social good better?”on April 29th, it’s incorrect to think about social media as medium for publishing content or for ‘doing publicity’. You can, of course do that if you so choose, but you’re really not seeing social media for what it really is.

A layer of communication; the world turned upside down

With the growth of mobile technology like smartphones and tablet PCs; social media feels less like a set of websites that we visit and more like a layer of communication, community and interaction that sits over our everyday lives. The growth of social media has led to an expansion in the self-production of media and to a blossoming of public debate. Social media can almost be considered a series of glorious, noisy islands lying off the coastline of traditional ‘real life’. The growth of public debate has grown from a mass adoption of this new kind of connectedness.

People who have made a career as social media strategists will tell you lots of stuff about brand value, reach, conversion and will keep talking until they’ve wowed you with metrics and strategies. Great, if that’s your bag, but they’re really talking about social media as a vehicle to drive sales. What if driving sales is not your aim? What if the relationship you want with other people is not just through the mechanism of financial exchange?

As with the adoption of mobiles phones and of text messaging, after an initial rush of early adopters, it has been people in the broadest sense, not organisations, that have made social media a force with which to be reckoned. Social media is still in a Wild West phase, not yet quite assimilated into our existing institutions and structures. It still allows hitherto impossible situations of creative disruption to existing ways of doing things – or at least it does if we grasp its potential. It has opened a new space where things might happen, and one which those with existing bases of power are keen to either occupy or to police.

As an extra layer of communication and connection social media builds networks between people, enabling the flow of information in such a way that reputation, and in turn, influence grows. In social media, the contours of this influence landscape don’t always follow the contours that exist offline. Many currently active on public social networking sites like Twitter are there precisely because Twitter throws up unexpected contacts and unexpected information. Social networking ‘power’ and ‘real world power’ have yet to settle into a comfortable relationship. The last two years has represented an intense period of legal cases and collective head scratching about the legal status of social media activity, a proxy argument for the question ‘where does this new realm of public action fit into our existing ways of doing things? Can social media make the powerful powerless and and the powerless powerful?’

Despite this element of creative disruption, the great, the good and the powerful have gone to where the people are, rather than trying to draw the people to them. Social media, once a flash in the pan to be discounted has increasingly become another front in the battle for real world power. At present all social media is a jostling between subversives, establishments and everything inbetween.

Just as the access to people has drawn those with real world power, the same has also been true of those who have previously found themselves ignored, discounted or acted against. Social media, for the time being at least, has evened some of these hierarchies. This is by no means guaranteed to be the case indefinitely. Social media is only the sum of the ways in which it is is used and is constantly in flux; making it even more important that we seize the time to make social good happen via social media.

They write about an emerging way of doing things online, with people’s online activities representing a series of expectations which, far from the mass consumption model of previous generations, “these consumers, it is argued, look to create relationship value with organisations, value that is personal to them, value that can be sustained or reduced by the specific encounters that they make”.

‘Relationship value’ is one key to understanding the potential and actual benefits of social media. People who are engaged with social media are not passive recipients of information. They are people who are actively seeking relationships with those that they follow, be they individuals, institutions or organisations. According to Burt and Taylor: “citizens (who are also the employees, volunteers, service users, and other stakeholders of third sector organisations) come increasingly to embrace the online environment, there will be growing imperatives to adapt and change in pursuit of new information-intensive relationships.

Increasingly, what we recognise as the public sphere is extending further and further into social media space and what happens in social media space is increasingly influencing the rest of the public sphere.

One of the most exciting, and challenging, aspects of social media is that it’s happening right now. It does not happen when the newspaper publishes a story based on a press release, or during office hours. Social media is a constant and never ending river made of packets of information. It constantly rolls past the attention of people observing.

As social media brings people together around interests (this is what I am interested in) and affinities (this is the kind of person I value) people with strong interests often find themselves conversing and sharing on a relatively level playing field, rather than finding themselves being divided by traditional organisational, structural, geographical or professional barriers. In this lies the potential for social media to jump traditional divisions between peers, and between organisations and the public.

Building something bigger than us alone

While relationships that extend across geographical and professional boundaries are the building blocks of social good through social media, the real horizon for building social good through social media is its potential to help us build things that are bigger than us.

Social media connects us with each other, with information and ideas and possibilities by creating ways in which we can all share little bits of something. That something might be a single tweet, a blog, a comment, a bit of time processing data, a few minutes proofing a document, a few pounds towards the funding of someone elses project. Social media has made it easier than ever before to share little bits of our surplus resources in ways that it make it easier for ourselves or others to aggregate them into something much bigger.

If anyone has witnessed how quickly a meme grows or how fast the process of developing an idea can move when it’s powered by social media-enabled relationships, they’ll have seen this process at work. Where once we were limited by people we had met in real life and with whom we could organise a face to face or telephone conversation, or by people we had met virtually and could communicate with by letter, now we can devote our resources to a social good working closely with people we have never, and will never, even meet.

Good reciprocal relationships make for good conditions for sharing and building together. That’s the opposite of ‘building your brand’.

It’s this something much bigger that really interests me, and which I hope to explore on the 29th April. I’ll be asking: in what ways can we use social media as a way of bringing together lots of little things to make a big change? I’ll be exploring how we make sure that social media does not lose its potential to disrupt in positive ways without succumbing to the crushing, deadening logic that turns social media from a zone of possibility and adventure to an arena for corporate message advancement.

I look forward to you joining me, Shirley Ayres and Paul Taylor on the 29th April to be part of a very social conversation. Book your ticket now – the early bird price ends 18th April.

PS: If you cannot access paypal we can provide an invoice but we will need to charge the full price to cover the additional costs involved.

PPS: If you are unable to attend and want to support what we are doing let us know if you would like to sponsor a place!

You can follow the discussions on Twitter using the hashtag #socialconvo

What makes it special for me is that Mark, Paul and I come from very different backgrounds but we have a shared interest in how social media is defining care, support and community engagement both online and offline in the digital age. We are also exploring what it means to be a social business and the importance of seeing social media as part of a core vision to transform your business rather than a marginal activity.

We are delighted that we already received sponsorship for a place at the event which has been awarded to Alison Cameron @allyc375.If you would like to sponsor a place at the event do get in touch! We look forward to discussing the questions submitted by participants and via Twitter.

Whether you work in the public, private, charity or social enterprise sectors understanding the impact of social media for social good is now essential. We do hope you will join us on the 29th April for a very social conversation. You can follow the discussion on Twitter using the hahtag #socialconvo. Following the considerable interest in my post “Is social media putting the ‘social’ back into care” we particularly welcome people from the care sector interested why “Social media is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate” .

Our conversations started when Stu Arnott @MindingsStu and I interviewed Mark and Paul for the Disruptive Social Care podcast. The podcasts have been downloaded thousands of times but just in case you missed these interviews…….

Mark Brown has been described as one of the smartest thinkers in the worlds of social media and mental health. Mark edits One in Four, England’s only national mental health and wellbeing magazine written by people who experience mental health difficulties. Mark is a director of Social Spider a community interest company helping people to make change happen.

Paul Taylor specialises on Innovation, Service Design and Research
and Development at Bromford a social business providing homes and support to over 80,000 people. Paul leads the Innovation Lab and he is particularly interested in the development of preventative social solutions and the power of technology to connect people. Paul was a key part of the team who developed the Bromford Deal which aims to shift resources away from reactive interventions and into more person centred customer care and support.

Hello! I’m Mark Brown. I mostly do mental health stuff. My work comes from my own experience of mental health difficulty. I don’t work for the NHS but I do spend lots of time effing about on twitter.

At a time when the NHS is experiencing it’s biggest challenges for at least a generation, I want to talk to you about the way in which social media can help to root the NHS in the fabric of communities. I want to talk to you about the ways that social media creates an opportunity for a whole new generation of ‘public professionals’, professionals doing their jobs while maintaining social media enabled relationships with a whole range of people..

But first I want to take you on a little journey…

It’s Sunday evening. The house is filled with the smell of ironing and leftovers and the sound of grumbling kids and grumbling adults all counting down the hours to Monday morning. You and the family settle down to watch something comforting and gentle on the television.

It’ll be set in some time between about 1920 and about 1963-ish. If it isn’t set then it’ll be set in a rural community somewhere as if it were 1920 to 1963-ish. It’ll feature an affable public servant. It might be a police officer. Or a doctor. Or a midwife. Or a district nurse. Or a coastguard. They’ll spend each episode doing their job but also being involved in a whole variety of shenanigans. The message will be they are a valued part of this particular, peculiar community of people. Occasionally they’ll come to blows with someone from The Ministry or similar, someone who represents the far-distant bureaucracy ‘who don’t understand our local ways’.

What these Sunday night comforts all share is the nostalgic appeal of a world where public services were explicable, knowable and human sized. It’s the fantasy of the local GP having a few pints in the snug of the local pub or the beat bobby who slurps tea in the local cafe. Its a yearning for the days when public services felt like they grew from communities, rather than being distant, complex structures that lurk at the edges of everyday life. It’s the c wish to feel like there’s someone who is part of our world that can also help to understand the world of public services.

Social media is in some ways the latest village square or local cafe. It’s a place where people check in to hear the latest news, catch up with friends, debate, flirt, ferment revolution and/or swap dirty jokes. In short, it’s a place where people do people stuff. Social media is where people are.

It’s very easy to underestimate how much of how the NHS works is opaque to the public. It’s like a big castle with high walls. It’s very easy to underestimate how much of how the NHS works and what the NHS does is opaque to the people actually working for the NHS.

There’s a difference between giving health advice and discussing health issues, just as there is a vast difference between individual treatments and the service which delivers them. The NHS isn’t staffed by robots. In fact we’re so scared that the NHS might be losing its human touch that we’re talking about training people in compassion and empathy.

So, what’s this got to do with public professionals and social media?

Public professionals talk about their job via social media. They combine two things: they appear in the public realm talking about their job in way that used to only be possible if a journalist thought you interesting enough to interview. They talk about the pleasures, they talk about the joys, they talk about the difficulties, they talk about the issues that arise from doing it. They put a human face and a human voice to what otherwise might seem a semi-robotic function. They help the public to understand the process, the practice and the limitations of healthcare.

Public professionals inform the public of their practice and in turn have their practice informed by the public. This is the second thing public professionals do: Public professionals talk to each other, they talk to non-professionals, they carry information into areas where it isn’t usually found. Using social media they get ‘out and about’. Public professionals learn from the blogs, tweets, videos and discussions that they find themselves in and carry this understanding into their work. It’s easy to forget just how much taxpayer funded knowledge and wisdom is currently sitting within the staff of the NHS. It’s awesome but it also ends up hidden from the people who paid for it. Public professionals jailbreak that knowledge and carry it out into the community via social media.

In a Nominet Trust paper published in 2011, Charities’ use of the internet – Current Activities and Future Opportunities: A state of the art review, Dr Eleanor Burt and Professor John Taylor talk about the emerging norm of social media becoming the medium for information-rich reciprocal relationships between organisations and those who use their services. Their point is that in social media, information doesn’t just flow outward from providers, it’s a two way traffic. And they’re right. People increasingly expect that organisations will speak back to them and listen to them.

It’s hilarious to me that the NHS has a challenge with engagement and involvement. Public professionals mix with people via social media (and often in real life too): they’re the person you talk to who is also a nurse, or a the person whose blog you read who is also a doctor. Public professionals are engagers and connectors by nature. You can’t do social media well without connecting with people. For people like me, who aren’t in the NHS, public professionals are a point of entry, a way into understanding it better and a guide to navigating the complicated flows of information, misinformation, spin and rumour.

If we trust people to make life or death decisions over others we can trust them to have opinions. If we’re battling for hearts and minds, which I think we are with the NHS, then public professionals are the best ambassadors there are.

But, you’re saying, surely we have comms departments and strategic communications plans? Comms is about broadcast. It’s a press office with bells and whistles. A vital function, yes. But Comms is about controlling the message, not growing the relationships a modern NHS needs to be part of the communities that it serves. Does your comms team know how to deal with feedback? Does your comms team know inside and out the issues involved in the day to day of healthcare?

I’ll bet they don’t even have a licence to converse. And I’ll bet you they aren’t experts on healthcare. NHS staff are, though. And when was the last time that your comms team spoke to people who use services and brought back some useful information about how things are ‘on the ground?’

In contrast, public professionals are a two-way conduit. They take information out of its NHS castle and while they’re outside, in the bustling town square of social media they learn, and talk, and listen and they take information back into the castle, too.

And, being part of a social media communities and relationships means public professionals stick around through the good times and the bad times because they’re a person relating to other people. You can’t be all ‘share our good messages, retweet our opportunities, big us up’ and then lock down your twitter account when a scandal breaks, as a Foundation Trust did last week.

Doing social media isn’t a separate job from doing a ‘proper job’. Public professionals fit in blogging, podcasting, tweeting around the rest of their work. You don’t need to be a social media expert to do social media. You just need to know your subject and just need to be really, really passionate about discussing it.

The rules for being a public professional via social media are really the rules for any healthcare professional: Listen, speak with respect and care, know your subject, don’t talk about the benefits of your work without discussing its limitations, don’t think you know everything, be proud of your job but not blind to its failings and be an advocate for the best of possible worlds by understanding where things are worst.

If you come and find me on twitter, I’ll point you toward some of my favourite public professionals. I’m sure the rest of the #nhssm community on twitter will do the same.

I’ll just leave you with this:

While social media isn’t the be all and end all of things: The public sector sometimes only gets the urge to engage with people when it wants something. How do you expect to engage the community, care for the community and be supported by the community if you’re not part of the community? That’s what public professionals do. And that’s why I love ‘em.

Thank you!

Mark Brown (@markoneinfour), Shirley Ayres (@shirleyayres) and Paul Taylor (@paulbromford) will be discussing “what can social media do to make social good better?” on the 29th April in Central London. You can book a ticket for the event here

On Friday Chris Bolton @whatsthepont and I will be exploring with staff how the Care Council for Wales@CareCouncil should be involved in social media. The Care Council is the social care workforce regulator in Wales responsible for promoting and securing high standards across the social services and social care workforce. It is worth noting that I first connected with Chris through Twitter!

It is so encouraging to see more and more care organisations that now understand the value and power of social media to communicate their values, purpose, share resources and actively engage with a much wider audience.

In the UK 24 million people are using Facebook every day and Twitter claims15 million users. Messages on social media can reach large numbers of people and it is important that organisations are clear about what they want to achieve from social media.

It is a reality that organisations are being discussed online and the choice is whether you want to be part of those conversations. The choice of platforms you use will be determined by your target audience(s) and where they are having conversations. Engagement through content that is relevant to your followers rather than just broadcasting is one of the key messages in developing a strong digital presence. Potentially all staff are your “brand ambassadors” so give them the confidence and permission to join social media conversations.

I am often asked about where to start in developing a digital engagement strategy and I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

Social media guidelines provide a framework especially if social care staff and volunteers are more used to the informality of channels like Facebook. Many organisations have found that proving a private social network such as Yammer encourages staff to experiment with being more social before they develop a public presence. Happily you do not have to reinvent the wheel when developing social media guidelines. The most important element is to ensure that you consult with your staff and reach a consensus about what is acceptable behaviour online.

Without digital leadership many organisations struggle to engage with social media effectively. Is a ‘digital’ leader any different from a ‘traditional’ leader? A question asked by @clarkmike as he shares his 10 top tips. Mike identifies a number of characteristics of the digital leader which include dismantling traditional infrastructures that act as barriers to innovation or which do not add value. Digital leaders support and champion people that are close to service users and customers and seek out people with different views and perspectives to understand how barriers can be overcome. Digital leaders have wide reach, they question and challenge, summarise and synthesise, simplify and de-clutter when necessary. They operate in a 24/7/365 disrupted & chaotic world building new connections & collaborations at speed and they communicate extensively. How many of these factors are intregral to current leadership training programme?

One of my favourite slideshares with excellent insights from Paul Taylor @PaulBromford about the Bromford Group experience of opening up social media access to all staff. Thanks for sharing Paul.

I hope that staff at the conference will be inspired to think about how Twitter and other social media channels can be used to communicate the purpose of Care Council for Wales and engage with a wider audience who also have an interest in promoting and securing high standards for social work and care.

We will be exploring the online care resources that are available in Wales, across the UK and internationally. Use #caregoesdigital to add your resource.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the care sector is the joining up all of the amazing resources which are available online. An example of using digital technology to do this is provided by the Connected Care Mindmap developed by @clarkmike. We have been identifying relevant resources over the past few months to share and give people a context for the problems identified through online discussions and the Priorities for Care survey at #psicare.

I have been on the periphery of a few conversations and discussions about the use of social media both for teaching and learning and about use of social media more formally in training and learning. Some partly alluded to in this post.

I am generally of the mind that use of social media are best considered broadly within communication skills and that there may be some forms of guidance that can be offered, mostly in terms of modelling behaviours, it isn’t a subject that either can or should be taught as a distinct subject matter.

These are my reasons

1) We are still at the early stages of knowing, learning and understanding the possibilities, format and etiquette of interactions which take place online. By ‘teaching’ we codify a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way where the right and wrong should merely be an extension of what we consider to be ethical practice and conduct in all spheres of life and communication.

2) We are confusing the tools and the medium for the content. Platforms come and go – from Usenet, bulletin boards, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs – the media can, does and will change. Teaching someone the basic IT skills to set up a WordPress blog is one thing and can be enormously helpful but teaching them what they should or should not put on it?

I think that’s better left to the community around them. Yes, mistakes will be made but that’s how learning grows. If someone doesn’t realise that disclosing details of a visit on their own blog is counter to professional codes of ethics, it isn’t because they don’t ‘get’ social media, it’s because they don’t ‘get’ professional codes of confidentiality.

3) Identifying self-appointed ‘experts’ who do the ‘teaching’ is a tricky area. What makes someone an ‘expert’ in social media? Is it someone with 5,000 followers on Twitter? Numbers are meaningless – followers can be bought and it’s more important who those followers are. Is an expert someone with a blog that has a following? Well, they might be an expert in writing a particular blog about a particular subject but I don’t think that gives them an authority globally. Or is it an academic that has written extensively on and about social media?Perhaps but it is a sector where the learning by doing is particularly prominent.

Learning about the theory of social networks is fascinating but does it help with the practical implementation? And what is ‘good use’ of social media anyway? Building a supportive network of people who think in the same way? Extending ideas and focus of knowledge? Learning about new research? We have different and fluid outcomes that are personal and individual – so how can a syllabus capture that? I’m not sure. Should it try? That’s a really key question. If there’s one area that self-directed learning and understanding really should flourish, I suspect it may well be this area.

4) Social Media is about building relationships and trust. No one can teach you to be authentic if you aren’t. No one can build an authority for you. You live or die on the content, information and relationships you build.

5) I worry that by creating a culture of ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ we are imposing a hierarchy of a system of ‘people who know’ and ‘people who don’t’ into an area that thrives particularly because it is able to break things down.

So how do we learn and ensure that people learn to use these networks safely?

I say by relying on just diving in and perhaps modelling some behaviour around ‘mentors’ – asking and helping as we go. Perhaps when we see people new to these networks we all take a responsibility to offer suggestions and advice. When I helped someone set up their facebook account, I went straight into the privacy settings with them and explained them.

Sometimes people need to be guided around the etiquette within different networks and forums and a gentle guiding hand can be useful.

My worry is that more formal teaching/learning will lose the instinctive learning-by-doing and learning-by-experimenting which have led to some amazing opportunities.

I’d be really interested in the views of others about this though. After all, we are all still learning. I don’t have the answers and I am willing to be swayed on this as it’s based pretty much on my own experiences and thoughts. So please do feel free to persuade me otherwise!

This was the third ‘unconference’ I’ve been to but I’ve not been specifically to LocalGovCamp before. As it’s my third, I feel almost like I’m beginning to understand the process but each have their own flavours and soon I realised that the melding of blogging/tweeting anonymously and turning up at events which have an underlying assumption of openness don’t always meld!

There are a lot of people with a lot of confidence, experience and knowledge and they actively want to share. I felt that at times I had to stop and absorb in order to learn and the live tweeting tailed off as I found it difficult to think, tweet and reflect simultaneously. As someone who is a bit ‘arms length’ from my employers, it was good to feel a part of the ‘local government’ community and I think it’s really important that people like me (not necessarily me personally, I’m probably less confident at these things than I should be) who are on the frontline of practice and service delivery attend as we can add something to the mix – I think! It’s easy to be a bit intimidated around impressive and confident people but everyone was very kind, warm and welcoming.

I attended a number of sessions including one specifically about social care. I was able to get a broader idea and impression of the place of social work within social care and the place of social care within local authority services.

I want to reflect particularly on that for a moment.

The broad theme of social care drew more interest than I’d expected. I think I always assume that there’s little interest in our work in the ‘town hall’ because we don’t get much feedback and feel a bit distant – especially as I’m seconded into a Mental Health team and can’t get my intranet/email from my local authority employers, let alone accessing any of their databases!

I kind of suspect that they forget we exist so even by proxy turning up at broad ‘local government’ themed events maybe tips a few people off that we are out there, visiting people in their homes every day and actively conducting local authority business, implementing the policy decided in offices and being a crucial contact between the citizen and the organisation.

A lot of opportunities exist at present in the context of the recently published Adult Care White Paper which pushes a ‘digital by default’ agenda to local authorities in terms of ensuring information is well propagated beyond those who are ‘eligible’ for care services. There are also increasingly going to be stronger pushes forward to ‘ratings’ sites and responses being collated into information that is vibrate and responsive rather than static.

So where is this work going to fall? Will it be a task given within a back office in commissioning or communication departments? Probably. I made a plea that there is some involvement from the frontline services that currently exist and hope at least that will be considered in parts.

In some ways health are further ahead with more useful information sites and some of those will be rolled out into social care including 111 telephone response services – I wonder if local authorities really know what they have been tasked to provide at this point.

Social care is an area where work and progress can make an immediate and active positive impact on the lives of those who might not be those who are shouting loudest. Broadening commissioning will help, as explained in the White Paper and that will be done by broadening conversations about commissioning and honestly about what is working badly as well as what is working well.

One day, I’d love to see some more senior people within my own council attending events like this.

Could there be a similar event specifically around social care? I’d like to see it. There are a lot of people who have great passion for the sector but the true value in these unconferences, particularly those outside working hours, are that the people who attend are those who choose to and who want to make things better, differently.

It isn’t all about new technology and new media. It’s sometimes about those meetings, those one to one conversations and discussions by people who can inspire and jog each other to promote change in the areas they work in.

A last thought, which is to mention #lgovsm . I attended the session discussing the community that meets ‘on Twitter’ between 8.30pm and 9.30pm on Tuesdays and provides an opportunity to build discussions outside our specific areas of specialism and expertise across local government as a sector. It was great to meet some of the people behind the conversations and I’m enthused to follow and attend these chats more regularly.

Top down and bottom up conversations are becoming more common as some of the ‘traditional hierarchies’ are being challenged by new ways of communicating– let’s have more of the cross-sector horizontal conversations. Let’s learn in social care from health, housing, environmental health and street cleaning about ways to engage and grasp the imagination of the public and the sector in terms of promoting new ways of doing things. Let’s learn from our comms teams about how they work and operate and the stories they want to hear from us. Let’s not hide in a ‘social care’ silo when there is so much information, knowledge, sharing and desire to share with us. Those are opportunities and they should be grasped in any and every way possible.

Let’s make social care and social work work better, but let’s also make local government and local government provided services work better all round. The two are inherently linked and I am passionately committed to being a part of a local authority that delivers the best services it can for all the citizens for whom it works – yes, my ‘specialism’ may well be social care and health but my interest is in involvement and participation at a fair broader level. Thinking ‘holistically’ needs thinking beyond the sector and that’s the joy of these events.

That’s what I learned. That wasn’t bad for one Saturday in July. I’ll take that.

Thanks to those who organised, coordinated and sponsored this event. It was a pleasure to attend and be a part of it and like a slow cooker, I’m germinating a lot of ideas that I expect will take a good few months to bubble to the top.

I spent a couple of days last week in Leeds, attending the Digital Health Conference and Hack. I wanted to fill in some initial reflections today and write more about some of the sessions I attended over the coming week.

The Conference

The first day – the ‘conference’ part – was put together with thought and care towards the participants with an excellent balance of speakers, workshops and opportunities to talk to one another (or ‘network’). Having been to many conferences which have overdone the ‘being spoken to’ elements – particularly in a day – I was genuinely delighted by the opportunity to feedback.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the day was the other participants and attendees. There were people from across the health and social care sector, including users of services provided (although as was pointed out, we are all users to a degree), voluntary sector organisations, technology based companies, commercial organisations and people from national and local government.

One of the themes that jumped out at me most spectacularly was how much was gained by putting us all in a room together where otherwise we might have no opportunities to meet, to create a positive energy (tinged with scepticism of reality to a degree) about what is actually possible to ‘make things better’.

Both ‘Maps and Apps’ and ‘Patient Opinion’ will be moving into the Social Care space directly and for me, it was a useful chance to discuss and think more deeply about the ‘social care’ angle on these processes and how they might directly relate to the work I do clinically on a day to day basis.

The second part of the day revolved around planning, discussions and moving forward but it’s hard for me to get away from the realisation that the most important thing that I took away from the day was inspiration and connections.

I met some truly inspirational people (primarily Claire Jones, the organiser of this event) and had some intensely interesting conversations. I connected with people across the traditional hierarchical structures that we are sometimes constrained by as well as some of the traditional ‘silos’ of interest groups that can be seen to exist within health and social care more broadly.

The Hack

The Hack Day on Saturday was a chance to discuss in more detail some practical ideas and uses for technology at work. The group I worked in provided me with an enjoyable, engaging and thought-provoking discussions. We came from very different angles to look at the problems we faced in working/using/dealing with NHS and Social Care systems and how not only technology but better communication and relationships could solve them.

The projects that were presented at the end of the Hack Day were genuinely useful and provided a chance to see change in action. It isn’t just talk although it’s impossible to underestimate the possibilities of talk.

The Conclusions

My main lessons from the event:-

1) Moving away from top/down and bottom/up models of communication as the sole way of transmitting information and ideas. The real change comes from horizontal as well as vertical chains of discussion. Look at other sectors as well as those at all levels of our own. How is agriculture managing this? What is education doing? We can get lost in our own world and of course, we need to look across health and social care. It’s a VERY big place. Many people who use and need our services to operate well can tell us best where we need to improve. Skills and knowledge is not a top down transfer.

2) Social Care is in genuine danger of being squeezed out in the ‘Health and Social Care’ debate and discussion. I was gently reminding some of the health people that we existed but I’d love to see more input from the sector and perhaps input more myself.

3) Social Media opens opportunities. I would never have come across this event without it. But sometimes, face to face meetings can reinforce ideas and relationships too.

4) Sometimes just sitting a few people together and talking about ‘making things better’ from completely different ‘starting points’ can be both inspirational and revolutionary. Let’s do more.

5)Leeds is an exciting and beautiful place. I want to move

I hope to write more specifically over the week about the ‘Maps and Apps’ project and the Information Strategy for Health and Social Care but all in all, I can’t think of a more satisfying and reinvigorating weekend I’ve spent in a long, long time so can only thank Claire for doing rather than talking about doing.

These are the people who will change the world. Rather than talk about changing the world. Thank you, Claire. Thank you, Leeds. I’ll be back and in the meantime, I’ll be plotting, planning but most importantly, talking.

The purpose of Blue Light Camp was focused particularly on the use of social media/technology solutions and problems faced by first response services – particularly police, fire, ambulance but including social care and auxiliary services which have attached involvement.

The power of the ‘unconference’ is to (as was said yesterday) to capture more of the networking that happens around more traditional conferences and growing some of the more interesting conversations that develop and pushing them to the centre rather than keeping them at the periphery.

After large scale introductions, the pitches for the sessions started and I could see some of the difficulties in making decisions about where to go.

I started at a session based around ideas in the ‘Art of Deception’ and took part in a fascinating and wide ranging series of conversations about some of the darker forces and concerns about the use of social media as well as drawing and sharing experiences of the benefits.

It’s easy to be swayed and entranced by the power of the digital and new waves of communication but there are still rules and patterns of behaviour to be learnt. Some ‘mistakes’ are made through the spread of misinformation unintentionally but there can also be mischief-makers and worse who can see different ways of spreading and using the power of the tool in malicious ways.

We can (and often do) make mistakes in our uses of social media. Sometimes the best thing to do is to apologise and move on. We should treat our ‘users’, ‘customers’, ‘the general public’ as adults (if they are!) and we will gain more respect through honesty and reliability as a result – but there’s a lot of latent fear of ‘bad use’.

It was a conversation that I continued over lunch with some of the other attendees and one that made me realise how near we are to the beginning of our learning cycles about both potential perils and opportunities afforded to us by our use of networks of communication and that today’s Twitter will be tomorrow’s MySpace. Platforms change, but ways of communicating change more slowly.

Immediately after lunch, I attended a session on co-production. This is an area possibly where social care are slightly ahead of the game with the push for more user involvement/engagement. What followed was an interesting discussion on how to use the ‘general public’ to have a stake in the services we need and use – even if we are not aware of it – like the fire service. There was a lot we can learn in social care as a whole though from the suggestions shared – such as encouraging engagement and responses through the use of Bubblino. How do we encourage ‘micro feedback’ and use it in our services as some of the traditional feedback mechanisms (long PDF documents and filling in ‘response’ forms) can be dry and encourage the same people who are time-rich to have the louder voices. It is an area that definitely needs more creative thought and it was useful to share information across different services rather than – to put it bluntly – to reinvent the wheel in an infinite amount of ways.

I then attended a session of brainstorming about a new potential platform/web site/forum/online space for First Responders to collate and share information outside the silos that are currently in place. It’s an area that interests me particularly as I think we naturally allay into our ‘work based’ personae in order to build protective silos and can easily forget the sometime crucial element of who we are ‘working for’ ultimately.

It’s often seen between and within health and social care. My simplistic solution to some of these problems in the past where they have existed locally is to co-locate training or even visits so that we can meet and understand the ‘people behind the telephone’. Grumbling about ‘district nurses’ is easy but when you know Amy who was very friendly and made you a cup of tea, it’s more difficult to grumble and then, when you have an immediate issue, you make a point of calling Amy because she’s ‘easier to talk to’ than ‘some of the others’ then you can see the differences breaking down.

When Joe from the local police station visited and you had a laugh with him, you’ll feel less intimidated or concerned about calling him over what you might think is a minor issue or question. It doesn’t always work like that of course, but knowing people makes it easier to speak to them about the little things that come up. So that’s how it is face-to-face – can these relationships grow in parallel ways online? I have no doubt. There are some people who I have built up relationships with online and would seek to enter conversations with them to ask questions/support in a more private forum (email/DM) and I can see that happening more frequently. Again, it’s all about trust.

The final session I attended was a fascinating breakdown of information about how twitter in particular was used during the riots last summer. Farida Vis, a communications academic who has been researching the use of social media as a part of the Reading the Riots research gave a presentation/initiated a conversation about the way the social media was used in a civil emergency situation. She has written a blog post here which I highly recommend as she explains the premise and results of her research directly. The slides she spoke from were also shared here. Particularly interesting is the visualisation which she represents about the spread of rumours and the ways the rumours were quelled.

I may well return to a more extensive post about the use of social media during the riots so I won’t feedback more extensively now except to recommend you read the links I shared above.

So after some initial anxiety about attending, I found Blue Light Camp both invigorating and compelling. I have more ideas, more contacts and more incentive to return to work and ‘make a difference’ – what I am struck by is how many motivated, interested and exciting people there are in this sector and how much we can do when we ignore some of the barriers which are often used to divide us into different sectors.

And I got a blue pig.

So thanks to the incredible organisation team and sponsors. Thanks to all the attendees and thanks for the kindness, friendliness and openness. It was a compelling and thought-provoking Sunday in Manchester. I hope to be back.